[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Licensing of liblouis tools and xml2brl
- From: "John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 13:51:14 -0500
Thanks to everyone for the feedback. My concern is simply to get the
libraries used as widely as possible. Some people might want to call
xml2brl from a GUI, as the Mac Louis does. They would not be linking to
it, just calling it. Would making it GPL have an effect on this?
John
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 10:54:37AM -0700, Neil Soiffer wrote:
> In general, I would like to see the tools have as loose a license as
> possible.* In cases where you are using GPL code, you're stuck with making
> them GPL.* GPL vs more open licenses such as BSD is a "religious" debate
> and I prefer BSD because it has fewer restrictions and is thus much
> clearer about what can be done.* But as I said, you'll get strong
> advocates on the other side of the issue.** Since liblouis is lgpl, the
> person who does the work/writes the tools gets to set the terms, not the
> library writer.* If you consider it a group effort, that's when the
> discussion can get heated.
>
> FYI:* a couple of years ago we wrote a COM wrapper for liblious so that it
> could be more easily used by tools that needed a MathML-to-math braille
> code translator, but didn't want to lock/link themselves to a specific
> translator or specific release of the translator.* The COM wrapper has
> gone stale and needs updating (any takers?), but I don't want that to be
> GPL.* I'm not even sure whether COM components are considered eligible for
> LGPL or not (they may or may not be loaded into the address space of a
> process).* I've always been a fan of NewSpeak when it comes to software
> licenses:* "less is more".
>
> *** Neil
>
> On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Samuel Thibault
> <[1]samuel.thibault@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Christian Egli, le Thu 01 Oct 2009 10:53:33 +0200, a *crit :
> > This implies that we need to relicense the tools (and only the tools)
> > under the GPL. So to that effect I have asked the copyright holder
> John
> > Boyer and John Gardner for permission to change the license of the
> > tools.
>
> Well, strictly speaking, although it's clearly a good thing to ask
> authors and users, LGPL can be casted into GPL without notice, as
> explicited in LPGL:
>
> *3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public
> License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. [...]*
>
> In the case of brltty, we did the converse: libbrlapi got turned into
> LGPL, which required consent from the authors. Brltty remained GPL.
> Samuel
> For a description of the software and to download it go to
> [2]http://www.jjb-software.com
>
> References
>
> Visible links
> 1. mailto:samuel.thibault@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> 2. http://www.jjb-software.com/
--
John J. boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
Abilitiessoft.com, Inc.
http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Madison, Wisconsin USA
Developing software for people with disabilities
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
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